Jane > Jane's Quotes

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.”
― Bill Watterson

“A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.”
― Garrison Keillor

“The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
― Brenda Ueland

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
― Laurence J. Peter

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

“Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience, and experience has made them cautious in their conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw from this the fine maxim that one should not scold children too much, but should make them trustful, so that they will not conceal their stupidities from us?”
― Catherine the Great

“We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“When I read these books, I no longer felt like I was confined to a very tiny world. I no longer felt housebound and bedbound. Really, I told myself, I was just brainbound. And this was not such a sorry state of affairs. My brain, with a little help from other people's brains, could take me to some pretty interesting places, and create all kinds of wonderful things. Despite its faults, my brain, I decided, was not the worst place in the world to be.”
― Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods

“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...”
― Keri Hulme, The Bone People

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“Puns are the highest form of literature.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“I don't believe you have to be better than everybody else. I believe you have to be better than you ever thought you could be.”
― Ken Venturi

“If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money.”
― Abigail Van Buren

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”
― Nora Ephron